When a business or residence is vacated, the primary telephone line for the business or residence may be put into an express dialtone (EDT) status. While in an EDT status, the line may have a dialtone and access to 911 and the telephone service provider. EDT lines allow for fast, low cost service startup for new customers. EDT lines, however, require all the capital equipment of active lines, but produce no revenue. As a result, as line growth utilizes spare capacity, the presence of these EDT lines may prematurely trigger capacity expansion projects thereby straining capital budgets. To combat this, EDT line management policies were adjusted so that older EDT lines (i.e., EDT lines that have been in existence for an extended period of time) were broken (or dismantled) to allow these lines to be used for other purposes. By decreasing the number of existing EDT lines, however, the expense of hooking up new customers increases.
Conventional approaches to determine when to break EDT lines are based on educated guesses. Because these educated guesses are not optimal, telecommunications service providers incur more costs than necessary.
Therefore, there is a need to quantify the trade-off between capital and expense for telecommunications inventory management policies.